Farming in the Very Early Middle Ages (cont.). Mansus, Villa and Husbandry

WE MUST NOW TURN to a study of the mansus, although the word itself did not appear before the seventh century; ¹ but the small country farm it denotes goes back much earlier than Merovingian times, for, to quote a shrewd observation made by a historian whose premature death robbed us of a fine scholar, the ‘meix’ (mansus) and its successors represent ‘the many varied aspects and uses of a thousand-year-old institution closely bound up with the family group and the economy of the plough’. ² The special contribution made by the Merovingian and Carolingian eras was the planting on the soil of Western Europe of innumerable peasant families who settled there permanently. The symbol of this settlement pattern is the mansus. The word came into common use in the ninth century. The polyptyques of religious houses adopted it to denote sub-divisions of the villa; but originally the word mansus, from the Latin maneo, meant the house, the dwelling-place, the home, and not the farm. The primitive meaning has moreover been preserved in French and Provençal in the words ‘meix’ and ‘mas’, ³ but naturally, in the language of Diplomatic, the connotation of the word was widened and it soon came to mean both the farmer’s house and the lands he cultivated.